What you need to know about The Ugly Duckling:
Hans Christian Anderson’s The Ugly Duckling is the story of a swan born into a family of ducks. The Duckling’s mother begins to notice that something is different about him before he is even fully hatched. The fact that he takes longer to hatch than the eggs of his siblings makes the mother suspicious that his egg may actually hold a turkey rather than a duck. However, she continues to help the egg to hatch, despite a lack of support from her children’s absent father, who she describes as a “rogue.”
When the duckling is born he is ugly and large, but because he is able to swim like his siblings, his mother deduced he that he cannot be a turkey as she suspected. After teaching her children how to swim, the mother shows The Ugly Duckling and its siblings how the world works: They see two families fight over an eel head with is taken by a cat, and they also see a Spanish Duck with a red flag tied to her leg whose lofty social status is recognized by both man and beast. This Spanish Duck then mocks The Ugly Duckling fro being so ugly, but his mother defends him by saying that while her son may be ugly, he does swim better than any of his siblings.
Soon afterwards, though, The Ugly Duckling begins to be rejected by everyone around him. His siblings hate him, and even his mother wishes that he had never been born. After leaving his family, he is further humiliated when he is kicked by a little girl who feed poultry. Depressed and lonely, he tries to live with some wild ducks who say that The Ugly Duckling is so ugly that they will like him, and that they will accept him on the condition that he does not try to marry into their family. The wild ducks eventually offer to help him marry some pretty, wild geese who live elsewhere, but immediately after they make their offer the wild ducks are killed by a sportsman with the piff paff of a gun. However, The Ugly Duckling is not shot and is able to escape because he is so ugly that even the sportsman’s dog will not kill him.
After this episode he takes refuge with an old woman and her two pompous animals: a hen named Chickabiddy Shortshanks who lays amazing eggs, and an egocentric cat named Sonnie. The old woman accepts The Ugly Duckling in the hope that he will provide her with duck eggs, but sadly he cannot. Also, the can and the chicken tell him that his desire to swim is ridiculous, and so he eventually leave the old woman and her pets so that he can swim again, which he loves to do.
Upon returning to the wild he enjoys swimming but is ignored by the other animals, One day, however, while swimming, he sees a flock of swans and feels a strange sensation. He is in awe of their beauty. After spending a winter swimming on a pond to keep it from freezing, The Ugly Duckling is eventually frozen himself, but luckily is freed by a peasant. Less luckily, he is chased away by the children in the peasant’s town when they tried to play with him. Thrown out again into a harsh winter, he returns to the swans and asks them to kill him, because he is so ugly. However, on his way to the swans he sees his own image and realized that he is not a duckling at all. Rather, he is a swan. He is so happy that he does not know what to do, and he feels glad about his previous suffering because he believes it makes his current pleasures all the better.
He never meets his biological mother or father, and the reason his egg was mixed in with a family of ducks is never revealed.
